Why You Don't Want Me To Grind Your Expensive Gold Nib Fountain Pen

[@MrG0CE]

U KNOW WHY I LOVE THIS CHANNEL?? BECAUSE U DO THINGS LIKE THIS WITHOUT BEING AFRAID, BECAUSE THEY'RE "JUST" PENS AT THE END. PEOPLE IN REDDIT WOULD BE REALLY MAD WITH U IF U JUST COMMENT SOMETHING LIKE THIS THERE. KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK !

[@macond0mac]

Hello! I'm a dentist here in Brazil, starting my collection of fountain pens. As i watch your videos, i imagine many materials from dentistry you can use to tune your nibs. I dont know if some abrasive tires (finishing and polishing of composite restoration) can help you to remove some material in between the nib tip (might work well, or not haha). And for final polishing, some RA two or three step diamond polishing system for pre-polishing and polishing gold and amalgam.

[@santauxia]

I recently bought me a Platinum Curidas EF, the nib was like a sewing needle. I tried smoothing it a bit, got frustrated at first but was able to make a usable nib, very happy. I used new nail polishing pads. Thank you DB for all this tips and videos, very helpful.

[@mellow-jello]

Shows the skills required to be a nibmeister. Only can think of having a nib grinding gig, where the CNC will help with the precision, and accuracy. Keep up the good work. Nightmare for those with OCD.

[@maidpretty]

Last week I tried to make some Lamy-type nibs smoother with a set of abrasives ending in sub-micron one. I made 2 nibs unusable in the process, and the only one I didn't break became maybe a tiny bit smoother. Well, though I got tools and grind my kitchen knives razor sharp, it seems that grinding nibs requires a special set of skills.

[@gnarthdarkanen7464]

Intimate knowledge of grits and polishing compounds, a reliable stroke style and method for consistency, and a VERY delicate sense of touch. Then remember that even with speed controls, power tools compound BOTH the progress and issues... Going lighter than you think you need with a finer grit or polish choice than you think you need will help mitigate the issues in the beginning... AND of course, as with everything "craft"... PATIENCE is solid gold. ;o)

[@maidpretty]

@@gnarthdarkanen7464Yes, you need lots of practice to produce consistent results. And it seems my fine motor skills lack the finesse needed. Maybe a jeweler or a watchmaker can get into nib grinding with little effort. I guess I'll be spoiling some more nibs.

[@gnarthdarkanen7464]

@@maidpretty Well, I haven't rendered any nibs (yet) completely unusable... I HAVE ended up with results I hadn't intended... more of a "stub" than a flex-point... line variation as long as you want "thick or thicker"... haha I started with re-sharpening and honing Exact-O blades (which are very scalpel-ish) to save money... and it does work, extending them to many times the normal lifespan... and accounts for some GREAT practice at getting that consistent stroke technique(s) down... I've since moved on to sharpen and hone single and double-edged razor blades by hand (with a spring-closing set of tweezers) on extra fine diamond plates and leather strop... which further helps as practice... I might also recommend just cutting up an older second-hand leather garment (jacket, gloves, chaps, whatever you can find) to make your own leather stropping utensils. The leather can be clamped or glued to stiffer material, and anything from the polishing sticks and cakes from Harbor Freight or other large tool shops to Valve Grinding Compounds from automotive supply places can be used to "impregnate" the leather for some more variable aggression and control on your results... You may also find that "dip nibs" are cheaper to come by without a lot of difference from the fountain pen nibs you're aiming to fix... This gives you a quick and dirty supply of nibs to play with at relatively low expense, so you don't cry over "ruining a great nib"... You can just shrug and hit "Speedball.com" (for instance) for another pack of 20 to 100 and get back to practice.. SO patience really IS the ultimate virtue for what you want. I'm a hobby metal smith, and VERY heavy-handed most of the time. With nerve damage in my right hand and arm from electrocution a couple decades ago, it hasn't been easy to get where I am... BUT it CAN be done... AND I believe YOU CAN do it, too. I believe in you. Don't forget to breathe and take regular breaks... Cut YOURSELF the slack. Good hunting! ;o)

[@maidpretty]

​@@gnarthdarkanen7464Thank you! I was indeed impatient. I started with extra-fine Arkansas stone, but felt little progress after grinding for a while. Thinking "Oh, the tip alloy must be too hard for natural stones" I took out 3\2 and 1\0 micron diamond stones - well, they were too aggressive, the tip was gone in a blink of an eye. I'll try leather with fine polishing pastes/sticks next time.

[@gnarthdarkanen7464]

@@maidpretty You're certainly ALWAYS welcome. There is a lot to be said about pressure as well as the stroke itself... when you work manually, that's really the meat and potatoes of getting the stroking clean and consistent... get too aggressive and even a fine grit can go faster than you'd expect... get too light and even a coarse grit won't seem to do anything... and different stones, paste companies, and polishing compounds can range in their results quite a bit... which is where I got to the "find something REALLY cheap" philosophy for practice. Getting mastery of your own personal method is more important than finding a particular product... SO experimenting is really where you'll find your best skill building... just getting a feel for what YOU can get each product or device or instrument or method to do for your sense of touch and "heaviness of hand"... as it were. Anyways... if I can help even one person find confidence in themselves and derive pleasure from personalizing their own things or creating new from scratch, it's worth trying. I happen to find a great deal of personal satisfaction from craft skills, and they regularly earn me at least enough to pay for themselves. ;o)

[@JefferyHall-ct2tr]

Hi DB!: Close shave there! I swore never to work on nibs after I broke the left tine off of a 14k Sheaffer Triumph point nib. I will send EVERYTHING off to someone who knows more than I!

[@paulmchugh1430]

I applaud you determination and increasing skill in nib grinds. It is just a bit beyond my abilities.

[@Doodlebud]

It appears to be beyond my abilities as well 😂

[@paulmchugh1430]

@@Doodlebud Nah, you have the ability and desire to get better at it, though I think steel nibs would have been better to start.

[@philnaunton7181]

Yeow! What did I learn from this edition? I guess buy a really good pen to begin with, and leave it alone. I'm way too clumsy to enter the world of micro-adjustments. Some of your videos are akin to watching horror films. The tension is almost too much to bear.

[@Doodlebud]

Barely saved this one! But it writes pretty nice now 😅

[@watster]

I have 4.0 reading glasses when I want to do small stuff. Really helps when you are past 50. :D

[@Doodlebud]

I ordered some 6.0 ones I found. I'll see how those work

[@watster]

@@Doodlebud I get some distortion, so I have to be really careful so I don't mess stuff up (more than usual).

[@JRobo-t3s]

I just kind of messed up a Platinum 3776 messing around with nib smoothing and polishing. Honestly was kind of gutting but your video has made me feel so much better. 1 because I found it to see about grinding gold nibs so that's great and 2. seeing a self professed amateur "Messing around" with a Montblanc has made my ventures feel less like folly and more like fun. wish me luck for my nib grind

[@Doodlebud]

It don't take much to mess things up

[@nope8535]

After grinding a few of my own nibs Ive found i like stub nibs. Still playing with exactly what I want in thickness but stub is definitely my preference.

[@Javi_C]

Mine too!

[@monkpato]

A helpful cautionary tale!

[@superadmin689]

I had similar problem with one vintage korean pilot pen. Squeezing tines together helped to align them parallel

[@mukeshjobanputra6721]

Crappy nibs was one of the reasons people stopped buying fountain pens 😂😂😂

[@Chris_the_Muso]

You really need a microscope. Amscope make some affordable ones. There's another rabbit hole to go down... The other magnification I use is strong reading glasses, with a clip on watchmakers loupe. The loupe is the kind with two different lenses you can swing down in front of your dominant eye (I'm left eye dominant). That gives me four different types of magnification - stereo with the reading glasses, reading glasses with each of the swing down lenses, and reading glasses with both lenses which is a lot of magnification. A good close working desk lamp is a must too. It's hard not to get discouraged when you mess up, but it's part of learning. I've been buying cheaper nibs to practice on. I've got all the grades of wet/dry sandpaper right down to 2000 and they shape the nib plenty fast enough. I wouldn't be game to go in there with a Dremel - too much opportunity for disaster. To open just a misaligned tip I find if I insert the feeler gauge (0.05 mm) just at the tip and squeeze the tines together just behind the tip I can get some improvement. I've noticed that a lot of the cheap nibs write way too dry because there's no gap to the tip at all. It's like it closes up as the slit is cut in the nib.

[@Doodlebud]

I do have one, but you loose depth perception when using it which makes things tricky. Here's the one I have. Works great to check as you go, but tough to use it for a live grind kzbin.info/www/bejne/r4etY3uij8aenJY

[@TheNightowl001]

I got some stones a while back, with the intention of trying to hand-grind a couple of UEF nibs that feel like my UEF Platinum nibs on my 3776 pens. I wouldn't DREAM of approaching a gold nib with a Dremel tool. And as you may or may not have discovered, any sideways pressure against that tipping may be enough to break the weld and "pop" that tipping right off a tine of a nib. Even attempting that on an expensive nib would terrify me!

[@Doodlebud]

With the dremel there's virtually no pressure. The tool moves so quickly and removes material like its nothing.... hence the extremally close call

[@Javi_C]

Takes a lot of courage to grind those gold nibs!

[@Doodlebud]

Haven't had issues when using my stones, but the dremel needs a bunch more practice

[@slo_carry]

I'm still afraid to mess with my nibs for the same reasons as in this video. 😅 At least you were able to make them work though 🙂

[@mikedr1549]

I have to say - you have some serious cajones to be grinding gold nibs with a Dremel!!!

[@tstthomason]

How well do you think a little jeweler’s saw would’ve done for cleaning up the end of the slit where it bowed together? I’ve been thinking about exploring making my own simple nibs by shaping some steel over a mandrel and using a jeweler’s saw to cut the slit. You can find blades for those saws with INCREDIBLY thin kerfs. And since they’re piercing saws, you can thread the blade through the breather hole on the nib and saw outwards which I think would help keep the metal in tension as you saw it

[@EnCwoisant]

Dooooooodlebud

[@jonathanunderwood5607]

What loupe do you have? Looking to pick one up, but there seems to be so many cheapies, it's hard to know if any of them are any good.

[@Trafficaloco]

Hey, great video. In another video you got a 149 for the price you wanted. Was it nos, mint , near mint? And what was the price? All I see is about 675.00 Thx

[@Doodlebud]

It was a NOS for $325

[@Trafficaloco]

Thank you 😊

[@paulherman5822]

Having a majority of vintage pens, their tipping is generally much less than a modern pen. I have several that it looks more like a silvery wash to the tip. Might be just excessive amount used today. 😉 No blob or ball on any of my vintage gold nibs. And like I found out early on, you tend to break the occasional thing, working on pens. Found this out on a lovely Conklin Endura (NOT the Yafa abomination. Truly made in Toledo, Ohio, not questionable origin supposed to be Taiwan.) Shattered it...😢

[@Seefood73]

I did maybe 10 grinds to date. all with paper and pads, starting at 400-800 grit. I would not dare use a dremmel yet at all, plus you used what looked like a VERY coarse plate and at its fastest point. I would start with a fine stone and at lower speeds (closer to the axis if you don't have variable speeds)

[@gnarthdarkanen7464]

Worth pointing out that there ARE both "knob" and "pedal" type speed controls available. The pedals are around the $20 to $30 (US) territory, and if you're going to mess with fine-work, then you've GOT to have variable speeds... one way or another... I currently have a pretty bad-ass reversible 8Amp Stylus, complete with greasable shaft-cable, quick-attachment/change stylus attachments, and a pedal speed control (which works for every dremel and drill in the house... haha) I'm saving up for some alternative stylus types for other jobs, since the one I've got is "heavy duty" (meaning up to 1/4" or 6 mm bits) with a fine drill chuck and key... It is expensive, but it's EASILY worth the expense, now that I've managed to afford one... It resides in a case I designated "Super-Dremel"... ;o)

[@ichirofakename]

I'm not positive, but I think I was born with little judgment on nib quality, thank dog.

[@Doodlebud]

In Dog we trust...

[@MrAndrew1953]

Good luck 🤞. I’ll turn the sound down.

[@StarKnightZ]

Can you buy some tipping and weld it?

[@cynthiaalvarado8610]

Wasn’t one of your first grinds your MB 149? You caution about gold nibs years later about the tipping material and why we need to keep some on gold nibs? You should rebrand your channel to daredevil bud!

[@Doodlebud]

My MB149 was the 2nd nib I ever did LOL. But I also used the stones. So pretty easy to watch the progress & go slow 😁. The tipping in the 630 seemed a bit different than other tipping I've ground before too. Seemed softer?

[@typewriterplants]

Dremel on any nib is a horrible idea. If you need to remove large amounts of material the best way I've found is a diamond stone knife sharpener.

[@Doodlebud]

Many nibmeisters use a dremel, they just have skill that I don't possess. I've done many grinds with my various stones previously and those have worked great. Using a fast rotary requires more skill but it does save a bunch of time if you know what you're doing, and I don't know what I'm doing with this setup yet.

[@Equinox051256]

I’m done with YT and all of their ads. Viewing time versus ads is a thousand times less than watching TV or a Streaming network. All YT will wind up doing is screwing the viewers, the people who have YT channels, and the advertisers in the long run. It’s a money grab by YT, plain and simple.

[@bharatc.sampat6406]

Stop playing around with what childish equipment and what experts created with massive research involved behind it.